Loftus: Was It Really a Shootout? – Madlanga Commission Day 158
Day 158 of the Madlanga Commission heard 2 witnesses on the killing of Bevan Loftus and 4 other men by police in a Durban flat on 1 April 2023. The first was his father, a former policeman who says his son was murdered in cold blood. The second was a retired SAPS captain and firearms expert who was among the first responders at the scene, and who told the Commission that the officers’ account of a shootout does not add up. The 2 witnesses disagree about who Bevan Loftus was, and agree that what happened in that flat was not what the SAPS has described.
Two versions of the same man
Gregory Loftus spent 20 years in the SAPS. On 13 August 2026 he took the witness box at the Madlanga Commission and read a statement that opens with the claim that his son was murdered in cold blood.
He said Bevan lived off the income from his towing and taxi business, and that if his son had been dealing drugs or killing people he would have known about it.
The SAPS version of Bevan Loftus is a different man entirely. Police have placed him in the drug trade and in the company of the Hollywood gang, and say he and the men with him opened fire on officers who then returned fire in self defence.
Captain Ashley Houston, the second witness of the day, did not support the father on that point. Houston called Bevan Loftus notorious, said he sat with the Hollywood gang in Woodville Road, and said he was an outstanding suspect in an intimidation case for threatening to kill a warrant officer. Houston said nobody wanted to arrest him.
What makes Houston’s evidence difficult to set aside is that he made those remarks and then took the officers’ account apart.
The recording, and the Chairperson’s correction
The Commission played a call recorded on 25 January 2023, roughly 2 months before the shooting. Bevan Loftus had phoned a man his father named as Clive Naicker, a competitor in the towing industry. On the recording Bevan said there was 2.5 on his head, accused the man of paying Hawks captain Deena Govender to do all these things, and ended the call by saying the fastest lives the longest.
Gregory Loftus told the Commission that when his son accused the man of paying Captain Govender to kill him, the man did not deny it.
Chairperson Madlanga took issue with that. He read the responses on the transcript back to the witness, pointing out that when Bevan accused the man of setting him up through someone called Dane, the response was a question followed by a denial of knowing Dane at all, and that when Bevan said you want to kill me, the response was, I do not. Madlanga said that looked at in context, the allegations were in fact denied.
Gregory Loftus accepted the point. He said, fair enough, that is the way it is read.
Clive Naicker has denied any involvement in the killing. In an article put on screen at the Commission, he described Bevan Loftus as an evil young man and said he had only ever had 2 or 3 conversations with him.
A hard drive, and a court application signed the day before
On 3 February 2023, police raided the Loftus premises on the Bluff over an allegation that Bevan had shot at police at Bluff Meat Supply. Gregory Loftus said his son never left the property that day, and that Captain Govender sent officers to remove the hard drive of the CCTV system at the house.
Gregory Loftus said the duty officer at Brighton Beach told him 2 days later that no shooting had happened at Bluff Meat Supply at all, and that no forensic team or photographer had been sent to any scene.
The family never got the hard drive back. Gregory Loftus said a police electronics technician stated that he downloaded the footage and there was no footage for 3 February, and that when he was asked to download it a second time the drive was password protected. The technician said he found that very strange.
On Friday 31 March 2023, Gregory Loftus and his attorney signed and issued a High Court application seeking to stop Captain Govender and the SAPS from killing Bevan, and seeking the return of the hard drive.
Just after 13:00 the following day, Bevan Loftus was dead.
28 rounds, and a low shoot
Houston retired from the SAPS on 31 March 2026 after 38 years and 31 days. He was a range officer and an accredited firearms trainer in the handgun, the shotgun and the rifle, and he told the Commission that the Metro Police trainers who trained one of the officers involved had themselves been trained by him.
According to the statements of the 5 officers who fired, Captain Pedro Rodrigues discharged 12 rounds from an R1 rifle, Constable Matthew Rodger Halford 10 rounds from an R5, Yogandram Megan Munsami 1 stun grenade and 1 round, Michael Menzi Shabalala 3 rounds from an R5, and Jevon Lee China of the Metro Police 2 rounds from an LM rifle. That is 28 rounds inside a small flat.
Houston said that if they fired that amount of rounds in such a small area, he would describe it as an overkill.
Shown photographs of how the bodies were found, Houston was asked whether that was consistent with the officers’ account. He said, never, it cannot be. He said a rifle fired at close range will lift a person and throw them, and that there would have been blood splatter across the walls. He said what he read and what he saw do not speak to each other.
On the damage to the walls, Houston said most of the marks were low, and that a trained rifleman moving through a house does not fire low, because the rifle sits in the shoulder from the moment a threat is engaged. He called it a low shoot.
Madlanga tested that evidence. Put to individual photographs, Houston conceded that the marks in the passage were hip height and higher, and that on 2 other images he could not tell how high the marks were because of the way the pictures had been framed. He did not withdraw the broader point, saying the passage wall could only have been struck from the opposite direction, which would mean somebody was facing that wall, and that an R1 or a .223 striking that wall would have taken large chunks out of it.
Houston also questioned the composition of the team that entered the flat. Rodrigues came from the dog unit, Halford was a DPCI constable, Munsami and Shabalala came from the National Intervention Unit, and China was Metro Police rather than SAPS. Houston said, for me it is a biryani mix, and asked whether it was a team mixed of skills or a team mixed of firepower. He said that when he trained house clearances, the prerequisite was 7 members to a room.
What still has to be answered
Deena Govender has not yet given his version to the Commission.
What is on the record is that 5 officers drawn from 5 different units fired 28 rounds into a small flat, that all 5 men inside died of head wounds, that no officer was injured, and that the footage which could have shown Bevan Loftus was at home a month earlier was removed by the same captain now accused of arranging his death.
A man can be everything the SAPS said Bevan Loftus was and still be entitled to an arrest and a trial. That is the question the Commission now has to answer.
